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Oh man, I can't tell you just how much more I like home-cooked food. Do yourself a favor and start learning how to cook. I took a week of vacation and went to

Oh man, I can't tell you just how much more I like home-cooked food. Do yourself a favor and start learning how to cook. I took a week of vacation and went to a cooking boot camp. It was great. It's certainly possible to make food badly at home, and often people do make taste sacrifices for nutrition, but it doesn't have to be that way. Learn to cook and you have total control over the nutrition and taste of your food. You can have BOTH!

jjoonathan 8y ago
Your accusation that I can't cook is unfounded and more than a little amusing given your stated level of training. I am not a chef, with the high level of professional attainment that entails, but I'm still orders of magnitude beyond a weeklong cooking bootcamp. The anticorrelation between taste and nutrition is real. Not universal, but real enough that "tasty and healthy" is a pipe dream used to sell cooking books and overpriced prepared food. Want your couscous to taste good? Add salt and fat. Want your veggies to taste good? Salt, fat, possibly a sear -- you can occasionally dodge this with an acid, but if you try to do that all the time the result is miserable (ask me how I know). Want your tomato dish to taste good? Sugar. These, of course, are absurdly broad generalizations, and any stage in this journey you are free to remove the sugar/salt/fat and cook health food, but you will tend to work a lot harder and still come up with less tasty dishes. IME, everyone who has claimed to cook tasty+healthy and who I have subsequently had the chance to evaluate has sacrificed in one or the other while deluding themselves into believing they have achieved both. Not being a jerk, I smile and play along, but the facts remain.
- loco5niner 8y ago
  > I'm still orders of magnitude beyond a weeklong cooking bootcamp As am I. Perhaps the problem is due to the assumption that cooking with salt, fat, and sugar is unheathly. Used within reason, it's not. You also don't have to add salt, fat, and sugar to everything to make it taste good. Learning to use herbs and spices helps a lot with that. It's important to start with good ingredients too. Take your tomatoes example. Sure, if you start with standard store bought tomatoes, you'll have to fix them. But get some nice heirloom tomatoes from someones backyard, cut thick with olive oil, a little salt and pepper, and basalmic? Fantastic. And theres a reason tomato sauce recipes start with onion... sweetness. No need for sugar. I LOVE microwaved/steamed/boiled corn on the cob with or without salt or butter. I will admit that I have one health related problem with all this food... portion control. Cause it's all SO good.
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    > the problem is due to the assumption that cooking with salt, fat, and sugar is unheathly I agree: it's not. Eating healthy is about getting enough of each micronutrient (not typically a problem) and not too much macronutrient(s). The problem is that people use questionable proxies for this. "McDonald's is bad," "Whole Foods is good," "home cooking is angelic mana straight from the heavens!" -- when in fact Grandma's potato salad with ranch dressing, cheese, and croutons probably has a substantially worse macronutrient profile than a BigMac, the pizza at Whole Foods probably isn't significantly better for you than the pizza at Domino's, and the seared + oil drizzled + salted veggies in a restaurant probably have about the same nutritional content as the equivalent you make at home. I also agree about tomatoes: it is in fact possible to fix them with salt and fat instead of fixing them with sugar. You can definitely get a more intense tomato taste than the store if you water them less than a commercial outfit would. I'm not nearly as crazy for this as most people seem to be, though. Good for salads, bad for sandwiches, but not to a degree that ignites my passions either way. "Heirloom" status is completely beside the point, except as advertising, for which it is solid psychological gold. > I LOVE microwaved/steamed/boiled corn on the cob with or without salt or butter. Yeah, because it's a sugary vegge-grain-fruit and sugar is good even without salt and butter. Of course, put some salt and butter on there and you have the holy trinity, which is downright delicious!
    - loco5niner 8y ago
      We seem to agree more than I initially thought. I certainly agree with this comment. I'll admit to a lazy use of "heirloom" as a replacement for "not-ruined-for-the-sake-of-looking-good-on-a-shelf".

jjoonathan 8y ago

Your accusation that I can't cook is unfounded and more than a little amusing given your stated level of training. I am not a chef, with the high level of professional attainment that entails, but I'm still orders of magnitude beyond a weeklong cooking bootcamp. The anticorrelation between taste and nutrition is real. Not universal, but real enough that "tasty and healthy" is a pipe dream used to sell cooking books and overpriced prepared food. Want your couscous to taste good? Add salt and fat. Want your veggies to taste good? Salt, fat, possibly a sear -- you can occasionally dodge this with an acid, but if you try to do that all the time the result is miserable (ask me how I know). Want your tomato dish to taste good? Sugar. These, of course, are absurdly broad generalizations, and any stage in this journey you are free to remove the sugar/salt/fat and cook health food, but you will tend to work a lot harder and still come up with less tasty dishes. IME, everyone who has claimed to cook tasty+healthy and who I have subsequently had the chance to evaluate has sacrificed in one or the other while deluding themselves into believing they have achieved both. Not being a jerk, I smile and play along, but the facts remain.

loco5niner 8y ago
> I'm still orders of magnitude beyond a weeklong cooking bootcamp As am I. Perhaps the problem is due to the assumption that cooking with salt, fat, and sugar is unheathly. Used within reason, it's not. You also don't have to add salt, fat, and sugar to everything to make it taste good. Learning to use herbs and spices helps a lot with that. It's important to start with good ingredients too. Take your tomatoes example. Sure, if you start with standard store bought tomatoes, you'll have to fix them. But get some nice heirloom tomatoes from someones backyard, cut thick with olive oil, a little salt and pepper, and basalmic? Fantastic. And theres a reason tomato sauce recipes start with onion... sweetness. No need for sugar. I LOVE microwaved/steamed/boiled corn on the cob with or without salt or butter. I will admit that I have one health related problem with all this food... portion control. Cause it's all SO good.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  > the problem is due to the assumption that cooking with salt, fat, and sugar is unheathly I agree: it's not. Eating healthy is about getting enough of each micronutrient (not typically a problem) and not too much macronutrient(s). The problem is that people use questionable proxies for this. "McDonald's is bad," "Whole Foods is good," "home cooking is angelic mana straight from the heavens!" -- when in fact Grandma's potato salad with ranch dressing, cheese, and croutons probably has a substantially worse macronutrient profile than a BigMac, the pizza at Whole Foods probably isn't significantly better for you than the pizza at Domino's, and the seared + oil drizzled + salted veggies in a restaurant probably have about the same nutritional content as the equivalent you make at home. I also agree about tomatoes: it is in fact possible to fix them with salt and fat instead of fixing them with sugar. You can definitely get a more intense tomato taste than the store if you water them less than a commercial outfit would. I'm not nearly as crazy for this as most people seem to be, though. Good for salads, bad for sandwiches, but not to a degree that ignites my passions either way. "Heirloom" status is completely beside the point, except as advertising, for which it is solid psychological gold. > I LOVE microwaved/steamed/boiled corn on the cob with or without salt or butter. Yeah, because it's a sugary vegge-grain-fruit and sugar is good even without salt and butter. Of course, put some salt and butter on there and you have the holy trinity, which is downright delicious!
  - loco5niner 8y ago
    We seem to agree more than I initially thought. I certainly agree with this comment. I'll admit to a lazy use of "heirloom" as a replacement for "not-ruined-for-the-sake-of-looking-good-on-a-shelf".